Once we have restored your mobility and functional movement through treatment techniques such as Manual Therapy, IMS or Acupuncture, then we work towards teaching you to learn how to move your body better. We call this Movement Retraining.
Over time, your body can learn bad habits with basic movements or postures. These bad habits may occur as compensation for previous injuries or as a result of asymmetries that may develop from work, recreation or sporting activities. Ultimately, these lead to altered mechanics of movement which are often accompanied by pain and dysfunction.
Through our Detailed Assessment process at Body Works, we identify what areas need to be released and what areas need to be activated and strengthened to help balance out your body.
Part of learning to move better is first recognizing how your body moves poorly or braces itself, and then learning how to change that.
Our brains have an amazing ability to change to help us adapt to new things.
The first step is being able to learn and feel what muscles you brace with and how to relax these muscles. Then you will be taught which muscles need to be activated to help balance things out. This is part of how you learn to lessen the chronic tightness in certain areas of your body.
When you can recognize these differences and learn to lessen the automatic bracing, then you learn to use the right muscles to help your body function better. This enables you to improve simple activities such as prolonged postures, learning to squat to sit in a chair, swing your golf club with better mechanics, centre your hips on your bike seat to allow you to pull through your pedal stroke with more power, or drive forward with your running to enhance your technique and lead to personal best.
Our physiotherapists use Manual Therapy, IMS ,Acupuncture and other techniques to help you lessen the tightness in your muscles during treatment. We also teach you self release techniques to help you independently maintain the gains in between treatment sessions so that you can keep moving forward in your recovery.
Once you relearn these basic movement patterns for function or sport, then we can progress your exercises further to include Functional Strengthening Exercises and Core Strengthening progressions, which will further improve your strength and endurance and ultimately help you to maintain the good mechanics that you have learned, be it over a long distance road ride or a 10km run.
Our ultimate goal is to help you get back to the sport you love with better technique as soon as possible.